Overstating (and Understating) US-China Brinksmanship
The commentariat is making too much of Barack Obama's decision to skip China on his current Asian tour. Obama visited China last year, and Hu Jintao is scheduled for a key state visit at the beginning of next year. Despite the usual sniping over currency, oceanic sovereignty, and human rights, US-China relations haven't changed much in a tangible sense in the past few years.
That being said, as time passes the US will be forced to take a confrontational stance against China due to the shifts in relative power between the two countries. Barring an unlikely economic collapse in China, it's fair to assume that China's economy will continue to grow faster than America's for the foreseeable future. Therefore, China's relative power is likely to grow too, which means that the US will face a strategic choice: either make increasing concessions to its new rival, or push back.
The American public seems to believe that the US should remain the world's preponderant power forever and ever, so the odds that any US leader will voluntarily make concessions to China are low. Therefore, conflict between the two is almost certainly destined to accelerate over time.
Any evolution of US policy toward China should not be viewed as a reflection of Obama's personal policy but rather as a reaction to present shifts in relative power. In other words, Obama seems like a 'China hawk' in comparison to Bush not because he feels any differently toward China but because the circumstances have increasingly dictated it.
